


spent half of your life trying to fall behind

by notavodkashot



Series: words are futile devices [11]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst and Feels, Gen, Loyalty, Oblique mentions of suicide ideation, The literal embodiment of the "It's Complicated" relationship status, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 04:03:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20333740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notavodkashot/pseuds/notavodkashot
Summary: The true tragedy of Regis' life is all the love stuck like poison under his lungs.





	spent half of your life trying to fall behind

Regis supposes that, if he could bring himself to hate Cor, his life would be that much easier. 

It’s not like there’s not plenty of reasons not to hate the recalcitrant little shit, either. He’s rude and he’s vicious and he has the one thing in all the world that Regis wants more than air itself: the King’s unquestionable approval. 

Regis knows he’s not the heir his father had hoped to have. He’s known this since he was born, second son set to inherit nothing, suddenly left to live up to the ghost of a brother whose face he can’t even remember. When his brother died, the world ended and his father ceased to smile. The manor in Caem was left empty, all the laughter and the brightness drowned by the steep, empty corridors of the Citadel in Insomnia. His mother packed up her bags and left for Altissia, and became the dark purple ink of her letters and the occasional trinket delivered with them – all fondled and scrutinized by dozens of hands, so by the time his own clutch the paper, her scent is long gone and her words look almost pale. 

Regis is a master of tormenting himself with memories he does not have. He doesn’t remember Caem, or the sea or the hand prints painted all over the once pristine walls of the manor, left in place to commemorate the fact the children who made them were loved and beloved and allowed to be children. He watches the recordings, instead. Silly clips taken by a trusted hand – a hand he guesses the owner of, but dares not ask about – mundane and unremarkable but for the fact they show him a family utterly lacking in royal standing. There’s a pointed lack of Crownsguard shadows in the films of that life he never got to live enough of to remember. A lack of servants and Lords and tutors, of protocol and courtly endeavors: only his brother and his cousin, running through the corridors, shrieking and laughing and caring not to hide it. Only his parents, amused and smiling and… together. 

But all that stopped, once Lumen died, and deep in his soul Regis is bitter, because he wasn’t enough to bring them back from that pit. He wasn’t enough to make his mother stay. He wasn’t enough to make his father remember how to smile. 

Up until his father came home with Cor at his heels, Regis had been resigned to the fact that his father’s love had died with his brother and that to pursue it was a pointless endeavor. But then Cor was there, sharp-eyed and vicious and rude, and the King would smile down at him, a small twitch of lips and a swipe of his hand over the short, messy mop of dark hair. Cor doesn’t try to make the King love him, Regis knows. Cor doesn’t try to make anyone love him. Quite the opposite in fact. 

But the King does care for him, the King does go soft and indulgent and pleased by Cor’s existence, in a way he’s never been about his heir. 

Regis thinks no one would judge him too harshly, if he did hate Cor, just for that. 

He doesn’t. 

He wishes to, sometimes, when he’s confronted with the reality of inheriting his father’s throne and his father’s war and his father’s failures, but not his love. He wishes deeply he could bring himself to hate Cor and his blunt truths. 

But then he remembers Cor, in the dark, offering him sweets with blood crusted under his nails, gently explaining he exists to bear the horrors of the war, so that Regis doesn’t have to. The candid promise to gouge himself in blood and slaughter, so that Regis might preserve the pristine halls of his own mind. The bedrock certainty he’s far too ruined already, all of fourteen years old and hollow wisdom, that sparing Regis the brutality of war is mere pragmatism in his eyes. 

And so, the first time Regis and Clarus fight, truly fight, it’s about Cor. 

Clarus has always been there, as far as Regis can remember, along the vague, indistinct shape of his brother and the stark, clear tornado that is his cousin. Clarus is his Shield, and not just because he’s the only candidate available; Regis would still choose him, if he had a million options, all brave and gallant and ready to serve. Clarus has always been there, long-suffering and wry but wise and gentle and determined to temper Regis’ will with good sense. Clarus is the one soul Regis trusts above all else, with all his fears and all his hopes, the best and the worst of himself, because Clarus never judges him for it. Acknowledges, but never judges. 

And still, on that day, on the day of their very first fight – painful first, and sadly not last – when Clarus makes a snide remark about someone beating manners into Cor, Regis finds himself snarling: 

“If you put a hand on the boy,” he says, voice gone low with fury, words tumbling down his lips without conscious thought, yet each solemn and grave as a royal decree, “you will lose the hand.” 

Because Cor is reckless and blunt and rude in that honest way that sinks deep into one’s soul, and Regis will never know for certain if that’s just who he is, or if it was the war that made him into that. Cor is fourteen, gangly limbs and sharp eyes, and knows himself safe in the knowledge the King has his back, so he feels no need to mince words and spare any courtesies to anyone. 

He’s an absolute brat, and Regis knows it, and the thought of anyone touching a hair on his head makes Regis full of visceral rage. 

Clarus splutters at the threat – it was a threat, Regis knows this the moment Clarus calls him out on it, and one dearly meant – and the ensuing row about a King’s dignity and a soldier’s loyalty lasts a whole month. Then Wes sits them down at the private dinner table in Regis’ quarters, serves them a warm meal and promises to strangle them both if they will not cease being stupid. 

Regis and Clarus make up over tea and Wes’ trademark cookies, the one with a dollop of chocolate right in the middle that melt in their mouth between bites, but crucially, no apologies are exchanged. None, Regis reckons, would have been accepted. 

* * *

Upon returning to Insomnia, Regis’ heart is so thoroughly shattered he wakes up every morning expecting to find his chest has caved in around the indent. 

Altissia was a crushing defeat, despite his sincerest hopes and all the magical heirlooms he’d collected on the way there. His mother laid dead in the bottom of the ocean, amidst half the city he’d been arrogant enough to claim he would liberate. And yet, he would have survived it all, he thinks, if only he still had Wes at his side, to hold him whole between his hands and promise it would be alright. 

Instead, he’s come home to his father’s taciturn acceptance of his defeat, unremarked upon as if no other outcome had been expected in the end. He’s come home to a cold, judging court that looks at him as the damnation of their world. 

Worst of all, he’s come home to meet a fiancée he does not want and has no choice but to accept, as meek about it as he would be about any other punishment for his failure. 

He watches her, sometimes, from a far: gliding along the corridors or sitting in the gardens, face hidden behind a veil and Cor always standing two steps behind her back. He wonders, sometimes, if she would be game to try and defy the King’s command. If she too would be happy to be spared the shame of being bound to him. She must hate him, surely, the way she’s chosen to uphold the most ancient, most profound rites of mourning for her father’s passing, to excuse herself from having to even look at him in the eye. He doesn’t blame her, really, he hates himself quite enough to be understanding. 

Regis watches his inner circle crumble, as weeks pile into months: absolute radio silence, from Altissia, Cid heading back into Hammerhead with his son – Regis’ nephew, another member of his family he was not allowed to reach out to, because it would not be proper, for an heir to the throne to acknowledge his cousin’s bastard son, and though the court knows better than to even breathe a word about the scandal that was never a scandal simply by force of involving Sylvia and her temper, they clearly do not think him anywhere near as fearsome – and Cor unceremoniously relieved from his duty to guard Regis and tasked instead to protect Regis queen-to-be. All he has left is Clarus, who loves him and chides him and tries his best to drag him out of the bland ennui of realizing the sort of life he’ll be living for the rest of his days. 

The Wall shrinks, and all Regis can think of is that might be enough to incite his kingdom to murder him for it, once his father is done dying from the strain. 

“He said he wasn’t the King I serve anymore,” Cor tells him, when he finds him sitting at the edge of a balcony, contemplating a wholly unglamorous way to end his life. 

In his hand, Cor clutches the Ring of the Lucii, offering it to Regis with the haunted, awkward look of a man not entirely certain of what he should do. 

Regis stares at him and the sudden, ridiculous realization that Cor might be the one person in the world that could be trusted to hold such a thing, without feeling the temptation to try it on. He would be dead, if he did, but of course, he wouldn’t. Regis considers reaching out, plucking the Ring out of Cor’s outstretched hand, and then flinging it and its monstrous symbolism far into the distance. 

“Would you?” Regis asks instead, looking at Cor in the eye – no need to lean down quite so much anymore, as Cor looks his official age more than his actual age now, than he did when they first met – head tilted slightly sideways to better appraise him. “Serve me, I mean. Like you serve my father.” 

Cor looks down at his shoes, shrinking inside his bones until he’s just a small boy and not the frighteningly efficient murder machine Regis knows he is. He looks young and ashamed and Regis regrets asking, all the more because all Cor says is: 

“If you’ll have me.” 

Regis swallows hard. 

“On one condition,” he says, reaching out to hold Cor’s hand, the Ring trapped between their fingers, pulsing with the dreadful power of his line, “Cor.” 

Cor looks up at him, licking his lips, eyes wide. 

“Anything.” 

“You’ll kill me,” Regis says, tightening his grip when Cor flinches and nearly pulls back, as if scalded, “the day it’s no longer honorable for you to serve me.” 

And there’s that look, in Cor, surprise evaporating and leaving behind only the ruthless, soulless blade forged in war, edge sharp enough to cut Regis’ soul off his bones. Because he thinks, before he speaks next. He thinks and considers and Regis knows he’s done the right thing, asking this of him, and not of Clarus. Then the moment passes, and Cor bends down to one knee, pressing his forehead to Regis’ hand. 

“Yes.” 

It’ll be almost two years to that day, before the King finishes withering away in his bed and Regis is properly crowned by grace of the Crystal, but deep in his heart, that’s the moment he’ll think of, when asked about the day he became King. 

* * *

Regis’ fiancée has no family name. 

She does, of course, and Regis knows it, but for all intents and purposes, she’s a ghost come to marry him, conjured by the dying King to ensue the future of his dynasty. Cor starts telling him stories about her, unsubtle and blunt as he always is, around the time she casts off the mourning veil for good. 

Regis marvels at Cor’s ability to make Regis incapable of hating, and how it stretches out to anything Cor touches. She’s his friend, Cor says, awkward and stern, and Regis finds the well of disgust drying up in his gut. 

And if she’s willing to try and salvage some semblance of sense out of the King’s inane demands that they must marry, Regis supposes he might as well meet her halfway. So he begins to accompany her and Cor during their walks in the gardens and the endless hours spent reading in the archives restricted only to those of royal blood. 

Aulea is witty and sly and callously blunt even in her most shameless lies. She’s also terribly, endlessly in love with Cor and doesn’t even bother to deny it, when Regis plucks up enough courage to ask. 

“Of course I love him,” she says, staring out the window of the small studio Regis has been using as an informal office since his father stopped being able to leave his bed. “He’s the only person in the world broken enough to love me for who I am.” 

“I don’t wish-“ Regis begins, conciliatory and brave, and then stops when she turns to look at him, blue eyes as sharp and pale as Cor’s own, and all his well-meaning wishes and stupid recklessness dies in his throat. 

“You and I will marry,” Aulea says, “and if we’re just a little lucky, we’ll not be wholly miserable about it.” 

“You can marry Cor,” Regis tells her, even if he feels slivers of skin peeling away under her glare. “Aulea, you don’t have-“ 

“I do,” she says, “we do. We will.” She looks at him the same way Cor looked at monsters, out in the wilderness, determined and fierce and certain no other outcome but victory is possible. “That’s all there is to it.” Then she softens, just the same way Cor did, that day in a dirty storage, hiding Regis from a riot and promising to shoulder all manner of horrors in his name. Regis doesn’t retch when she reaches to hold his face in her hands, but it’s quite a near thing. “There is a method, to your father’s madness. There is a reason he insists we must do this. Trust the King, it will be alright in the end.” 

Regis runs and runs and does not see her again, until his father’s funeral, on the eve of his wedding and his crowning ceremony. 

“You can cry,” she tells him, soft and oddly sweet, sitting next to him on the edge of their married bed, and then tugs him into her arms as she presses her lips to the indent of the circlet against his temple. “Your father is dead and you hate what he’s made you into. You can cry, only your wife will ever know.” 

She knows, he reckons, quite a bit about that. She knows quite a bit about all sorts of things that seem impossibly daunting, right there and then. 

Regis weeps and weeps and doesn’t even notice when he falls asleep. 

* * *

Cor is gone, by the time Regis wakes up as King. 

Cor is gone, and no one will tell Regis where or when or how. All he has is Sylvia’s tempestuous scowl and the fact Clarus will not look at him in the eye. 

“Can I tell you a secret?” Aulea says, holding his hand and pressing her lips against his forehead, “I think he loves you too, and he’s too stupid to realize it.” 

Regis laughs and doesn’t tell her it’s not a real comfort to know it, more so when the stories start coming from the frontlines, the legend of the Immortal unfurling one massacre at the time. 

* * *

Regis has worked hard, while Cor has been away. 

He’s become the kind of King he hopes won’t shame his friend to serve. He’s wrestled the council under his thumb and devised all sorts of strategies to maintain the struggle against the inexorable hammer of the war. He’s rooted out corruption and vice, from the court and the Crownsguard and all the dark places his father allowed it to nest for the sake of secrets he never told anyone. 

In the morning, the message will be dispatched. If Regis has truly done his part, Cor will be home before the month is through. 

“Don’t ask yourself what if,” Aulea tells him, fingering his hair as he shudders breath after breath against her collarbones. “Don’t torment yourself with it.” 

Regis laughs – doesn’t cry - and leans up to stare at her in the eye – so unsettlingly familiar, her eyes, his eyes, blue and pale and sharp and warm like ice melting in the sun. 

“If,” he begins, and she silences the rest with fingers pressed against his mouth. 

“He’s my brother,” she says, “nothing more.” 

Nothing more. 

Regis doesn’t have the heart – any heart left, really – to explain what if is the one thing he’s truly good at. 

* * *

“I’d be so much more useful,” Cor says, four whiskey glasses in, sprawled on the floor of Regis’ office, staring at the ceiling because his voice has gone soft and quiet and there’s an edge of shame to it, “in the frontlines.” 

He’s not wrong, to be fair. Regis knows this. Regis knows the tally, trailing after Cor like an endless tail of bloodshed and misery. There is a reason, he understands now, that his father used Cor the way he had. Cor is talented and vicious and powerful and strong. Cor’s presence alone has been enough to turn the tide of entire battles, the weight of his reputation striking bone-deep terror in the hearts of those on his same side. 

He’s an exquisitely honed blade, cutting through Regis’ enemies like a scythe against ripe wheat. 

“You tried to retake Paddra,” Regis says, reaching a hand to tilt Cor’s head up until his eyes are forced to meet Regis’. “On your own.” 

“Mors always said-“ 

“Cor,” Regis interrupts, voice soft and kind because he’ll never be able to look at Cor in the eye and not see the ridiculous brat that collected marbles and refused to be afraid of anything. “I know why you tried.” 

Regis knows he’s right because Cor looks away, guilt and shame and heartbreak all over his face. 

“It’s all I’m good for,” Cor whispers. “It’s what I’m made for.” 

Regis doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry. Screams and tears won’t change a thing; if nothing else, he’s learned that much. 

“It’d mean a lot to me,” he says instead, “as your King and your friend, if you tried your hand at something else.” 

Slowly, tentatively, with the sort of hesitation that speaks of one fully expecting to be turned away, Cor inches his way into Regis’ arms. 

“Thank you.” 

Regis holds him close, his poor, poor Marshal, his wife’s brother, the brother he himself never hated, and for once in his life allows himself not to wonder what his life would be like, without all the choices his father made for him. For all of them. 

* * *

When Cor takes Aulea and vanishes into the night, Regis refuses to send anyone to track them down. It’s long been coming, he reckons. He talks himself in and out of many stray chains of thought, while they’re gone, but in the end he can almost tell himself he’s glad for them. If they hadn’t come back, he’s certain, he would have forgiven them. 

But they do, and when they stand before him once more, all the placid rationalizations melt away into a fury that almost consumes him to the marrow of his bones. 

Then Aulea tells him the truth, the whole sordid, vicious, poisonous truth, and the only thing Regis can do is weep. For his son. For them. For everything they will never have. 

“I’m sorry,” Cor says, because he’s still the best of them, even as they sit in the emptiness of the throne room, clinging to each other and the cruelty of the destiny wrapped tight around their throats. “I am so sorry.” 

“I’m not,” Aulea says, one hand clutching the back of Regis’ head and the other digging into Cor’s arm. “It’s the world that should be.” 

Regis weeps and laughs and refuses to say anything at all, lest he guts himself on the words he knows neither of them want to hear. 

* * *

One day, while they were out in Duscae and Cor was still more terrifying than reassuring to have around, Regis remembers vividly, he and Clarus had gotten into a row over something or other and then Cor had won the argument by virtue of horrifying all present with a deadpan assertion that people like him didn’t get to have graves at all. Upon returning to Insomnia, Clarus had retroactively snatched away that victory by buying Cor a plot in a very nice and quiet cemetery. Regis had picked up a fight with him, over that, horrified all over again by the morbid tone of the joke and the fact Cor had been touched by the gesture instead of outright pissed. 

Looking back, now, Regis admits he was mostly jealous at the fact Clarus and Cor had an inside joke of their own, and had become close enough friends to laugh about something like that. 

When Aulea dies, Cor is gone on a self-imposed rescue mission for the one of Regis’ saboteurs he inherited from his father and whom he thinks needs rescue least. He’s far too tired to be angry about it, though, but he remembers that empty plot, as Sylvia walks him through the pompous mockery that is to be the Queen’s funeral. 

It’s not too hard, really, to make a choice. 

He commissions the grave anonymously, and when the time comes, he orders the Queen interred not in the monstrous monument Sylvia insisted he had to give the mother of his heir, but under a simple marker with her favorite sword. He debates on the initials far more than on the wisdom of the whole endeavor, but she was his wife, for better or for worse, so in the end it’s_A. L. C._ that’s carved on the stone, instead of just _A. L._

He wonders what Cor will say, when he comes back. 

If he’ll come back at all. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out on [DW](https://notavodkashot.dreamwidth.org/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/notavodkashot), if you'd like.


End file.
